“The spiritual path of Jünger found its salvation in writing and voyages.”

Robert Steuckers

Ex: https://niekischtranslationproject.wordpress.com Robert Steuckers is the author of a reference work, “La Révolution conservatrice allemande (2014),”
that compiles biographies and selected texts from this great
intellectual movement of which he is a recognized specialist. He is at
the head of the movement Synergies européennes after having left GRECE
in 1993. We interviewed him about an emblematic figure of the German
Conservative Revolution, Ernst Jünger, as well as a personality less
known by the public, Armin Mohler, great theorist of the Conservative
Revolution. PHILITT : You distinguish many currents within the German Conservative Revolution. Which one does Jünger belong to?Robert Steuckers:
Ernst Jünger belongs, surely, in the National-Revolutionary vein of the
“Conservative Revolution,” almost from the start. It’s a current
necessarily more revolutionary than conservative. For what reasons does
Jünger fall into this revolutionary nationalism rather than another
another category of the Conservative Revolution? Like many of his
counterparts, the reading of Nietzsche, before 1914, while still an
adolescent, was determinant. We must firstly summarize that Nietzsche,
in this era, was read above all on the most controversial fringes of the
German left and by Bohemian literati. There reigned a joyous and
mocking anarchism in these milieus that tore off the masks of the
bien-pensants, that denounced hypocrisies and castigated moralism. It
was in the overflowing spirit of the Wandervogel youth movement, in
which Ernst Jünger participated from 1911-1912. The discovery of
Nietzsche left few written traces in the work of Jünger. Between his
return from the Foreign Legion and his engagement with the German
Imperial Army, we have few of his personal notes, letters addressed to
his parents or friends. His biographer Heimo Schwilk simply notes that
Jünger read the Will to Power and the Birth of Tragedy.
We can deduce that the adolescent inherited a rebellious attitude from
this reading. No established order found grace in his eyes. Like a good
number of his contemporaries in the Belle Epoque, where they were bored,
he rejected what was frozen. So it’s essentially the Nietzsche they
called “critical” and “unmasking” that transformed 18 year old Jünger.
It was necessary to think dangerously, according to the injunctions of
the loner of Sils-Maria. It was also necessary to make a complete
renewal, to experiment in incandescent living in communities of
Dionysian ecstasy. This ardent living, the war would offer him. The
cataclysm freed him from the boredom, sterile repetitions, hesitant
humdrum in educational institutions. The experience of the war, with the
daily confrontation with the “elementary” (mud, rats, fire, cold,
wounds …) destroyed all the frozen reflexes that a child from a good
Belle Epoque family could still harbor in his heart. Where does the nationalism of Jünger come from? What made Jünger
a “nationalist” in the 1920s, it’s the reading of Maurice Barrès. Why?
Before the Great War, they were conservatives, but not revolutionary ones.
Henceforth, with the myth of blood, sung by Barrès, they became
revolutionary nationalists. The term, rather new at the start of the
Weimar Republic, indicates a political and aesthetic radicalization that
broke with the conventional right. Germany, between 1918 and 1923, was
in the same disastrous situation as France after 1871. The Barrèsian
revanchist model was thus transposable in humiliated and vanquished
Germany. In following, not inclined to accept conventional political
work, Jünger was seduced, like Barrès before him, by General Boulanger,
the man, he wrote, “who energetically opened the window, throwing out
the babblers and letting fresh air in.” With Barrès, Ernst Jünger not
only found the keys to a metapolitics of revenge or an ideal of violent
purification of political life, in the fashion of Boulanger. Behind this
reception of Barrès there was a mystic dimension, concentrated in a
work that Ernst Jünger had already read in high school: Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort. It
holds necessary an orgiastic drunkenness, which does not fear blood, in
any sound political approach, that is to say in the context of the era,
any non-liberal non bourgeois political approach. The National-Revolutionary camp, within the Conservative Revolution,
was thus essentially a camp of young former soldiers, directly or
indirectly influenced by Nietzsche and Barrès (often via the
interpretation Jünger gave). A camp that very much desired, if the
occasion presented itself, to make a coup in the fashion of General
Boulanger, this time with the Freikorps of Captain Ehrhardt. Starting from “The Peace”
an essay published in 1946, his work seems to take an individualist
turn, maybe even spiritual. Must we see a break with the Conservative
Revolution there? I think that the “individualist” turn, as you said, and the spiritual
and traditionalist attraction operated surreptitiously since the very
effervescent political period, from 1918 to 1926, ceased to animate the
German political scene. The treaties of Locarno and Berlin brought
appeasement in Europe and Germany signed more or less satisfactory
treaties with its neighbors to the East and West. We can no longer speak
of a revolutionary period in Europe, where everything would be
possible, like National-Bolshevism from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The
futurist and Barrèsian dreams were no longer possible. The Bolshevik
up-welling, it too faded, and the USSR tried to stabilize itself. Jünger
made the first of his voyages, leaving Germany, with a scholarship to
study marine fauna in Naples. The encounter with the Mediterranean was
important: its landscapes calmed the Nordic soldier coming from the
Hells of Flanders and Picardy. The treaties and the trip to Naples
certainly did not interrupt the editorial activities of Ernst Jünger and
his brother Friedrich Georg. They both participated in the most
audacious journals of the little nationalist, National-Revolutionary, or
National-Bolshevik sphere. They were resistant towards the advances of
Goebbels, Hitler or Hess: above all because the two brothers remained
“Boulangists.” They did not want to participate in political carnivals,
they placed themselves under the sign of a nationalism born from war and
the refusal of the implications of the Treaty of Versailles. Since the
advent of National-Socialist power in 1933, the retreat of the Jünger
was accentuated. Ernst Jünger renounced any position in the literary
academies brought to heel by the regime. Sitting in these controlled
academies would lead to a sterile, even quietist, humdrum life rather
than a Nietzschean one, he could not accept. It was also the time of the
first retreat to the rural zone, in Kirchhorst in Lower Saxony, in the
region of Hanover, the cradle of his paternal family. Then a few voyages
to Mediterranean countries, and finally, uniformed sojourns to Paris in
the occupation army. It is an aging Jünger who expresses himself more in this individualist tone? The abandonment of the entrenched positions of the years 1918-1933
certainly came with age: Ernst Jünger was fifty when the Third Reich
collapsed in horror. It also came from the terrible shock of the death
of his son Ernstel in combat in the marble quarries of Carrare in Italy.
At the moment of writing The Peace,
Ernst Jünger, bitter like most of his compatriots at the time of
defeat, stated: “After a likewise defeat, we do not rise like they could
rise after Jena or Sedan. A defeat of this extent means a turning point
in the life of all people that it subdues; in this phase of transition
not only do innumerable human beings disappear but also and above all
many things that would move us more deeply in ourselves disappear.”
Unlike the preceding wars, the Second World War brought the destructive
power of the belligerents to paroxysm, to dimensions that Ernst Jünger
qualified as “cosmic,” especially after the atom bombing of the Japanese
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our author understood that this
destructive excess was not longer comprehensible in the usual political
categories: in fact, we enter into an era of post-history. The defeat of
the Third Reich and the victory of the allies (the Anglo-Saxon and
Soviets) had rendered the pursuit of historical trajectories inherited
from the past impossible. Technical means had lead to mass death, the
destruction of entire cities in a few minutes, even a few seconds, which
proved that modern civilization, as his biographer Schwilk wrote:
“tends irremediably to destroy everything that underlines the natural,
traditions, organic facts of life.” It’s the post-historic age of
“poly-technicians of power” which began everywhere, and above all in
ravaged Europe, forming the world to its standards. The 22nd
of September 1945, Schwilk recalls, Ernst Jünger wrote in his journal:
“They know neither Greek myths nor Christian ethics nor French moralism
nor German metaphusics nor the poetry of all the poets in the world.
Before the true life, they are only dwarfs. But they are Goliath
technicians – thus giants in every work of destruction, where they
ultimately conceal their mission, that they ignore as such. They have a
clarity and unusual precision about everything that is mechanical. They
are confused, stunted, drowned, by all that is beauty and love. They are
titans and cyclops, spirits of darkness, negators and enemies of all
creative forces. Those who can reduce millions of years of organic
development to nothing by a few meager efforts, without leaving anything
behind that could equal the least spring of grass, the least grain of
corn, the smaller wing of a mosquito. They are far from poems, wine,
dreams, games, hopelessly lost in fallacious doctrines, articulated in
the manner of pretentious professors. Nevertheless, they have their
mission to accomplish.” Are those the words of a disillusioned man? They are the sentiments that Ernst Jünger wanted to communicate to his
readers immediately after 1945. Schwilk, in my eyes the best biographer
by far, explains the meaning of the gradual evolution that occurred in
the spirit of our author: Everyone is guilty in this Second World War
that was the “first collective work of humanity.” And a work of
destruction! Political projects could no longer be national, reduced to
small or middling nations alone. It was necessary to create Europe,
Jünger thought immediately after the war, where the peoples could
recognize that the war had been simultaneously won and lost by all. This
Europe must renew the principles of tranquility of the Middles Ages or
the Ancien Regime: he clearly renounced the concepts that he forged in
from 1920-1930, those of “total mobilization” and the “Worker” that had
formed the quintessence of his National-Revolutionary philosophy just
before Hitler’s rise to power. These concepts, he stated in 1946, no
longer lead to anything positive. They called to push humanity into
horror. Thus Jünger became the prophet of “deceleration” (die Entschleunigung), after having been the prophet of paroxysmal acceleration (dieBeschleunigung) in
the 20s, like the Italian Futurists gathered around Marinetti. Jan
Robert Weber released a biography of Ernst Jünger in 2011 centered
around the notion of “deceleration:” he explains there that the
spiritual and “individualist” progression (I would say the progression
of the anarch) was deployed in two principle phases: the retreat to
writing, claimed as a refuge to escape the work of the titans and
cyclops or the degenerating throes of post-history; then voyages to
Mediterranean refuges which, very soon, would become victims of
voracious modernity and its strategies of acceleration themselves. Jan
Robert Weber: “It calms me as a man who travels across the world in
post-history.” Armin Mohler was the secretary of Ernst Jünger and worked to make the German Conservative Revolution known. Could you tell us more about his role? It’s evidently not so much a rupture with the Conservative Revolution
(which has too many facets to be able to reject entirely) but with his
own National-Revolutionary postures. Armin Mohler wrote the first
laudatory article on Ernst Jünger in Weltwoche in 1946. In September 1949, he became Ernst Jünger’s
secretary, whose first task was publishing a part of his war journals
in Switzerland, under the supervision of the moderately existentialist
and Protestant philosopher Karl Jaspers, from whom he retained a
cardinal idea: that of the “axial period” of history. An axial period
creates the perennial values of a civilization or geo-religious great
space. For Armin Mohler, very idealistic, the Conservative Revolution,
by rejecting the ideas of 1789, from English Manchesterism and all the
other liberal ideas, laid the bases for a new battery of values to
regenerate the world, to give it a new solid course, through the efforts
of audacious elites, following the idea of amor fati formulated by Nietzsche. The ideas expressed by Ernst Jünger in the National-Revolutionary journals of the 1920s and in The Worker
of 1932 were the “purest,” the most purified from all regressive
baggage and all compromises with one or another aspect of pan-liberalism
of the “stupid 19th
century” which Daudet spoke of, it would be necessary that these ideas
triumph over post-history and revive the dynamism of European peoples in
their history. The sustainability of these new values’ founding ideas would sweep away
the lame ideas of the Soviet and Anglo-Saxon victors and surpass the
very caricatured ideas of the National-Socialists. Armin Mohler wanted
to convince the master to return to the struggle. But Jünger had just
published The Wall of Time,
whose central thesis was that the era of historical humanity, steeped
in history and acting within it, was definitely over. In The Peace,
Jünger still evoked a Europe unified in sadness and reconciliation. On
the threshold of a new decade, in 1960, “national empires” and the idea
of a unified Europe not longer enthused him. There was no other
perspective than that of “universal state,” the title of a new work.
Modern humanity was delivered to material forces, to endless
acceleration of processes what aimed to seize the entire world. This
planetary fluidity, also criticized by Carl Schmitt, dissolves all
historical categories, all peaceful stability. So to reactivate them has
no chance of leading to anything one way or the other. In order to
complete a National-Revolutionary program, as the Jünger brothers
imagined, they needed willing citizens and free soldiers. But this
liberty had faded from every regime around the globe. It was replaced by
obtuse, cumbersome, instincts like those that guide insect colonies. So the attitude of the anarch described by Jünger is an alternative, a new perspective for this era. How it is defined? Before the extent of this anthropological catastrophe, the anarch must
try to escape the Leviathan. His will of independence, calm and no
longer rowdy, must espouse the “will of the Earth,” that seeks to
smother the Goliaths and titans. For Armin Mohler, Ernst Jünger
renounced the heroic ideals of his youth. He didn’t accept it.
Corresponding with German language journals in Paris, he regularly
addressed mordant and ironic reproach to Ernst Jünger. It was their
rupture. The criticisms and recriminations were: Mohler wrote that
Jünger had aligned himself with the “democracy of the occupiers.” Worse:
he accused the second wife of Jünger, Liselotte Lohrer, of being
responsible for this reversal; she ensured that her husband, “took the
ideas that forged their destiny from his own disciples.” Did this tension transcribe itself into the reception the “Nouvelle Droite” gave to Jünger’s work? The French Nouvelle Droite emerged on the Parisian political-cultural
scene at the end of 60s. Ernst Jünger first appeared to it in the form
of a booklet penned by Marcel Decombis. The Conservative Revolution,
more precisely the thesis of Mohler, was evoked by Giorgio Locchi in
issue No. 23 of Nouvelle École. Beginning
with these texts a diverse and heterogeneous reception emerged: the war
texts for the lovers of militaria; the National-Revolutionary texts
(little known and little translated) in bits and pieces among the
youngest and most Nietzschean; the journals among the silent anarchs,
etc. From Mohler, the Nouvelle Droite inherited the idea of a planetary
alliance between Europe and the enemies of the Yalta duopoly firstly,
then American unipolarity next. It’s the direct heritage of the politics
and alternative alliances suggested under the Weimar Republic, notably
with the Arab Muslim world, China, and India. Moreover, Armin Mohler
rehabilitated Georges Sorel in a more explicit and profound manner than
the Nouvelle Droite. In Germany, Mohler received a third of the space in
the journal Criticon, directed
by the very wise and much missed Baron Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing in
Munich. Today, this Mohlerian heritage has been assumed by the
publishing house Antaios and the magazine Sezession, directed by Götz Kubitschek and his spouse Ellen Kositza. Armin
Mohler worked in France and had shown himself to be relatively
Francophile. However his position on the question of French Algeria
contrasted with that of the proponents of the “Nouvelle Droite.” What
does this controversy teach about the relation between Conservative
Revolutionary thought and the world? Armin Mohler was effectively the correspondent of various German and
Swiss papers in Paris since the middle of the 1950s. He learned the
spirit of French politics: a magisterial text (which revived the
Jüngerien cult of Barrès a bit …) attests to this enthusiastic
reception. This text was titled Derfranzösische Nationaljakobinismus and
has never been translated! Mohler was fascinated by the figure of
Charles de Gaulle, who he qualified as a “political animal.” For Armin
Mohler, De Gaulle was a disciple of Péguy, Barrès and Bergson, three
authors that we could interpret and then mobilize in order to
re-energize the values of the Conservative Revolution. Regarding the
Algerian affair, Armin Mohler reasoned in his text on Gaullisms (in the
plural!), Charles de Gaulle und die Gaullismen, in
terms drawn from the work of Carl Schmitt (who, at the time, criticized
the “stardom” of Jünger, his art of publicity seeking as a “diva;” the
criticisms of Mohler could be compared to those formulated by Schmitt…).
For the jurist, theorist of “great spaces,” and for Mohler, Jünger had
committed the sin of “de-politicization.” Mohler’s infatuation with De Gaulle is astonishing! Regarding the phenomenon of “De Gaulle,” Mohler was full of praise: the
general had succeeded in decolonizing without causing a big political
explosion, a general civil war. He also praised the founder of the Fifth
Republic for having begun a great institutional upheaval after the
turmoil caused by Algerian independence. Here again, he benefited from
the reading of Schmitt rather than Jünger, that said: the Constitution
of 1958 was ultimately the work of a Schmittian, René Capitant; it
values the political much more than the other constitutions in the West.
To which Mohler added that he approved the introduction of direct
presidential election, following the plebiscite of October 28th
1962. Ultimately, Schmitt, the disciple of Charles Maurras, Maurice
Hauriou and Charles Benoist, was horrified by “intermediaries” between
the monarch (or president) and the people. Mohler, inspired by Schmitt,
welcomed the presidential suppression of the “intermediaries,” the
logical consequence of the new constitutional principles of 1958 and the
power concentrated in the person of the president, from 1962. The
“Fourth Gaullism,” according to Mohler, is that of “Grand Politics,” of
an alternative global geopolitics, where France tried to escape from the
American vice, not hesitating to align with “rogue” states (China, for
example) and assuming an independent policy with the entire world. This
“Grand Politics” shattered in Mai 68, when the “chienlit” demonstrated
and began “their long march through the institutions,” which lead France
to the big carnivalesque joke of today. Mohler, not so much as a reader
of Jünger but as a reader of Schmitt, was Gaullist, in the name of the
same principles of his Conservative Revolution. He thought we could only
judge De Gaulle on Schmittian criteria alone. He commented on the
adventure of the ultras on the OAS along those lines. So Mohler belonged
to another political school than the future leaders of the Nouvelle
Droite. The German New Right possessed other idiosyncrasies: the
convergence between Mohler and the Frence Nouvelle Droite (with the
Jüngerian Venner) only came about when the differences of the Algerian
War were no longer relevant. Mohler wanted to transpose the Gaullist independent thinking into
Germany. In February 1968, he would defend the Gaullist “Grand Politics”
point of view at a meeting of a “Euro-American colloquium” in Chicago.
This text, released in English and not translated in French, has the
merit of a programmatic clarity, it desires to remove Europe from the
straitjacket of Yalta, under the banner of a new European Gaullism. If
there is a lesson to draw from it, not from this argument but from this
intransigent Euro-Gaullist stance, it’s effectively that a Schmittian
reading of European political decline (in the era of post-historical
decadence) proves itself to be very necessary. And that an exit program
from all incapacitating subservience is imperative, otherwise we will
sink into a definitive decline. All the ingredients of our disappearance
are near. Is the influence that Jünger exercised on Mohler felt in our contemporaries’ reception of the German Conservative Revolution? For the most part, yes. Despite the great diversity of aspects and
perspectives that the Conservative Revolution takes and adopts, Jünger
the National-Revolutionary, the nationalist soldier, doubtlessly
fascinates more than than the anarch or the voyager who observes wild
worlds more or less still intact or the entomologist who engaged in his
“subtle hunts.” However, it is also exactly the central idea of “The Wall of Time”
that is not without relevance. We are marinated in post-history through
and through; as for Gaullism or a similar Europeanism, we hardly see a
trace: Sarkozy and Hollande have liquidated the last vestiges of
Gaullist independence. The anti-American stance of Chirac in 2003, at
the time of the Second Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, is already a
distant memory: rare are those who still invoke the Paris-Berlin-Moscow
Axis, defined by Henri de Grossouvre. However, the long list of authors
suggested by Mohler in his doctoral thesis advised by Jaspers, inspires
numerous intellectual vocations. We can no longer count the theses on
these authors, even if they have been ostracized for a long time in the
name of a “political correctness” avant la lettre. All these studies do
not share the same approach. But beyond history, in the disordered
tumults of chaotic post-history, this long buried world of increasingly
blurred memories will be reconstructed. In order to make a museum? Or in
order to make the premises of a “grand return?” The
figures of the rebel and the anarch are marked by a living aspiration
for liberty, which is not without links to a notion of adventure based
on the dignity of the human condition with Mohler. Is the free and
adventurous individual the archetype of man that the Conservative
Revolution idealized? Yes, the liberty of the writer, the authentic man, the autonomy of the
person, are inevitable qualities of the rebel and the anarch. Or better:
they are embodied by them alone. Mohler, in a philosophical and
theological debate with Thomas Molnar in the journal Criticon, had
christened this “heroic realism” by the name of “nominalism.” The
Nouvelle Droite, uniquely translating his contribution in the debate
with Molnar, reprised his account of the term “nominalism” to express
his heroic existentialism, to somehow affirm a sort of primacy of
existence over essence, but through very different narratives and
features than Sartre. “Nominalism” as defined by Mohler, ultimately has
very little to do with the nominalism of the Middle Ages. Not only does
the adventurer hero, the absolute Nietzschean, embody it, but also the
quiet anarch, the voyager who seeks unsullied worlds, the explorer who
defies the traps of virgin nature, the vulcanologist like Haroun
Tazieff, captain Cousteau or the observers of grand land or marine
mammals or the entomologist, all are equally figures who refuse the
conformism of millions of consumers, the bleating flock of post-historic
conurbations. In the ranks of the Nouvelle Droite, no one defined the
adventurer better than Jean Mabir in an interview he gave with Laurent
Schang, today a contributor to Éléments. This interview was published in Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes. Mabire expressed there, like in his literary chronicles collected in « Que lire ? »,
an authentic existentialism: that which desires rooted (in their
physical homeland) but adventurous men and castigates the rootless and
timid. In this clear formula, in this limpid distinction (thanks to my
friend Bernard Garcet !) the vital program that we must apply to
ourselves in order to become true rebels and anarchs is summarized.